Prestigious honour for North Manchester General Hospital consultant

Prestigious honour for North Manchester General Hospital consultant

09 April 2014

Professor Andrew Rowland, a consultant in paediatric emergency medicine at North Manchester General Hospital, has been made a ‘Churchill Fellow’ having been awarded a prestigious 2014 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship.

Set up in 1965 in memory of Sir Winston Churchill, The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust carries forward his legacy by funding British citizens from all walks of life to travel overseas, to bring back knowledge and best practice for the benefit of others in their UK professions and communities.

Professor Rowland will travel to Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Colorado in America; Malaysia and Singapore to report back how UK paediatric emergency medicine services and child protection services could be better developed to safeguard children.

He said: “I’m really delighted to have received this Fellowship and hope that I will bring back some valuable information which we can use both locally and at a national level which will improve the services that we provide for children who have suffered from, or who are at risk, of significant harm.

“A Churchill Fellowship can only be awarded once in someone’s lifetime so this is my one chance to make the most of it and help to raise the standards even higher at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and beyond.

“During my research I will be looking specifically at what training is given to clinicians working in emergency medicine to help them recognise the more subtle cases of children who are at risk of, or who have suffered from, significant harm. I also intend to see how child protective services and child advocacy centres interact with paediatric emergency medicine services and what lessons we can learn from the way systems are organised in other countries which may be relevant to us in the UK.

“Crucially, I hope to be able to understand the impact that legislation on mandatory reporting of child protection issues has, where it exists abroad, and how this information can feed into the debate that I am sure will occur in the UK in the not too distant future about whether legislative change should also take place in this country in line with other jurisdictions”.

Mr James Stuart, clinical director in emergency medicine at North Manchester General Hospital, said: “Andrew’s award is well deserved. We all look forward to learning from Andrew’s research when he returns to North Manchester General’s Paediatric Emergency Department later in the summer.”

A Fellow is fully funded to travel overseas for between four to eight weeks. Past award winners include nurses, artists, scientists, farmers, conservationists and members of the emergency services.

This year there were 1,182 applicants of which 255 were interviewed in London. Professor Rowland is just one of 137 who were awarded a Fellowship this year.He has also recently been made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) and he has been appointed as an honorary professor at Salford University.

Professor Rowland will deliver an invited lecture later this year on the subject of ‘safeguarding vulnerable children in emergency medicine’ at the International Conference on Emergency Medicine in Hong Kong.